Blog Archives

In the recent past, one of the stumbling blocks in collecting statistics about data breaches was the unwillingness of breached entities to share information. As you can image, this could be embarrassing for the group that was breached and could be thought to lead to additional dangers, not to mention a slew of legal hoops, etc. For the past 5 or 6 years Verizon has helped a great deal…

From Jeff Kell (ITD-Security and Network Engineering): March 9, The Register – (International) It’s official: Adobe Reader is world’s most exploited app. Adobe’s ubiquitous Reader application has replaced Microsoft Word as the program that’s most often targeted in malware campaigns, according to figures compiled by F-Secure. Files based on Reader were exploited in almost 49 percent of the targeted attacks of 2009, compared with about 39 percent that took…

IT is working on A LOT of infected machines that picked up their badness from Facebook. At this point, if we see less than 3 a week, I would be shocked. Now, in addition to malware and spyware coming from the site, Facebook is gaining attention as a haven for scammers. Give the article below a read for additional information: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

The email from the Webmaster @UTC.edu today Subject “ Re:Notificaiton “ is a Phishing attack. Do NOT respond. UTC ITD or the Webmaster never sends requests asking the campus to respond by sending UTCID, password, address, department name. For additional details on Phishing please check the ITD Power Point presentation on Phishing http://itd.utc.edu/Training/PhishingandYou.ppt. ITD presented a training session during the summer on Phishing and will present additional training for…

I’ve heard several people lately say, “I haven’t changed my password since I started working here”. That’s not a good idea. I ran across this article at Microsoft about passwords that might be helpful. 5 Tips For Top-Notch Password Security P.S. I just noticed the article was written by Kim Komando. She has a weekly radio show on WGOW 1150 at 10am that is certainly worth listening to. You…

If I ask for an email catalog from The Sharper Image and decide later that I don’t want to get a monthly update from them about their new products, I feel pretty confident that clicking on the “Unsubscribe” button in their emails should do just that. I should be unsubscibed from their email list. However, if I’m getting emails for things that I don’t want (foreign drugs for example),…

We would just like to thank everyone for coming out and participating in the ITD phishing Q&A. We had a really good turn out and we hope to draw that crowd again for our next one. We will post the slideshow from the presentation in the next day or so. Keep checking back here for updates and announcements on future Q&A sessions.

A user’s account may be locked if it has been compromised. If you have given out your username and password to an unknown party, it can be used for email spamming. Email spamming from the university could lead to us being blacklisted on spamblock-servers. This, in turn, means that legitimate email from the university to sites that have us blacklisted won’t go through. This can be anyone from Yahoo…